


"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

by spectralarchers



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Based on a Tumblr Post, Don't copy to another website, F/M, Flerken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 05:30:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20577263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spectralarchers/pseuds/spectralarchers
Summary: "What if Nick Fury let Goose (the cat) stay with the Bartons when his office got upgraded?"Or, three times Goose was a regular cat for the Bartons and the one time Clint realized she's actually an alien life-form.Very short one-shot based onthis gifseton my tumblr, as well as two separate asks I got on tumblr.





	"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

“She’s been very touchy lately,” Laura says, as she lifts up the cat from her lap, and puts her down on the floor again. Immediately, the tabby moves back up onto the couch and spreads across her stomach and her lap.

Clint watches the little scene unfold another time, as Laura gently puts the cat down onto the carpet on the floor of the flat. Lucky’s ears and eyes have turned towards the scene, and his tail is wagging ever so slightly, as if him and Goose know something Clint and Laura don’t.

Clint shrugs. “I don’t know man, Fury said she was special, maybe she likes girls more than boys?”

Laura makes a sound, to which Goose responds with a chirp, and she giggles. “What’s wrong, buddy?” she asks the cat, as it slides along her crossed legs, before sitting down and watching Laura with its big eyes. “You know I don’t speak cat, right?” Laura continues, as the cat chirps again, and this time Lucky lifts his head from his pillow. 

Clint moves from the table where he’s sitting trying to figure out rent (that shit is hard), and comes to sit next to Laura. As soon as he’s sitting down, Goose jumps up on his leg and sits down, alert and demanding attention, which Clint acquiesces to. 

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

The cat then moves to Laura’s lap again and bends forward, to sniff at her lower abdomen, more or less around the area of her belly button. As Goose lifts her head again, she makes a repeated chirping noise, as her tail flicks behind her.

Clint and Laura turn their heads towards each almost at the same moment as the realization dawns on them.

Clint will later say that he screamed “you’re pregnant!” half a second before Laura did, and Laura will later say that she screamed “I’m pregnant!” half a second before Clint did, but they will both say that Gosse plopped down from Laura’s lap and headed to Lucky’s bed with a satisfied look on its face.

* * *

“One of the motion sensors went during the night,” Clint says as he’s pouring steaming hot coffee into his favorite SHIELD mug (it’s still got the old logo, and he thinks of it as an antique). 

Laura’s head perks up from feeding Lila, who’s decided the cornflakes they’re trying to give her are definitely NOT the food she wants this morning. “Anything we should be worried about?”

Clint stretches his back as he turns around, and Laura can’t help but peek a look at the little part of his stomach that gets exposed as he does so. Clint catches it. “No peeking,” he grumbles, before rubbing his eye with his free hand. “Apparently not, I did a perimeter sweep but didn’t find anything. It’s been raining since too, so if there were any traces, the rain will have gotten rid of them.”

He sighs, as he strokes his hair. Lila lets out a disgruntled shriek, and Laura puts down the spoon back into the bowl of cornflakes. Clint clears his throat, before taking a sip of coffee, as the little bell on the cat door jingles. Goose usually doesn’t go out that much, but she’d insisted on being let out last night, and when she comes into the kitchen, she’s filthy.

Clint immediately puts down his mug and picks her up, so she doesn’t leave any more footprints on the wooden floorplanks. Goose purrs as he does so, and when he puts her down in the sink, she looks at him before chirping again. “What the hell have you been up do, kitty?”

As he turns on the kitchen tap, Goose turns around to look out the window and if Clint didn’t know that cats will randomly stare at things humans can’t see, he still feels the hairs on his arms rise, as if something had been out there.

* * *

When Clint gets home from New York, from Loki, from everything, he is so defeated and broken that he barely registers most of what is going on around him.

He doesn’t really watch the television, and going out to take care of the horses gets his mind off things. He can feel the itch from where the scepter touched his chest, and whenever Laura is off to work and the kids are at school, he’ll often end up crying in the shower.

Today he’s sitting down next to the toilet bowl, his guts as empty as can be, dark purple bags under his eyes, as he heaves for air. The nightmare had felt so real. He realizes he hasn’t closed the door properly when the cat, that freaking cat, shoves it open with her little body, and climbs onto the towel that he managed to pull around himself.

She immediately starts sniffing at the scar that’s still grey on his chest, the little noises she makes as she investigates the burn helps Clint ground himself again. Loki had made him to terrible things, and he was still haunted by it. The mark from the scepter, from when a mythical god had come down from above to steal the Tesseract.

What if he had been successful in bringing the Helicarrier down? What if he had killed all those people on board, Natasha, Maria, Nick, Phil included? He feels his heartrate go off again, and closes his eyes as he tries to zone it out again.

He feels Goose’s paw on his mouth and he opens his eyes to find the cat staring at his eyes. “What are you doing, honey?” he asks, his voice broken and cracked, like his body feels, and the cat chirps a bit at him, before headbutting his chin.

She licks the burn scar from the Scepter before she lies down next to him, on the wet kitchen floor, and rolls into a ball. His hand instinctively starts to pet her, and he feels himself finally finding a bit of peace of mind. 

* * *

It happens so quickly, he barely registers that something has happened.

It’s been three weeks since he came home from… well, from New York. At the time of the battle, when the hole opened up in the sky and when aliens came crashing down from above, all he had thought was that he needed to get through it. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t slept for weeks. Not since that fateful night at the PEGASUS research base, when Loki had taken him against his will. It didn’t matter, because all he needed to do was make sure that nobody got hurt. That the world didn’t end. Because it was his responsibility.

It’s been three weeks since he came home, and he’s struggling. SHIELD has sent him to see doctors, they even suggested going to a PTSD-group in town from other veterans, to talk to someone who went through something similar, but he hasn’t been able to. Because he’s the only one who’s tried it. Along with Selvig, but he’s off in Stockholm talking about science things.

Goose has been incredibly clingy as of late. She was never a big cuddler - something Fury had warned him off when he let her stay at the farm - but ever since he’s come home… She’s been different. As if she knows that there’s something wrong. Something building up inside of Clint, as if she knows that there’s nobody on this round Earth who can relate to the pain of being brainwashed by a God and by powers that shouldn’t exist.

She’s been grooming for the last part of the hour. Clint has pulled the curtains shut, the migraine that’s been building in his head is massive. Any sound, any light, anything at all is a bother, as if it ends up being amplified by some sort of machinery. The light hurts his eyes and the sounds…

There’s a fly in his room. Even though he can’t see it, he knows it’s there because he can hear it. He can hear it buzzing, stopping, moving on and buzzing some more. However, when the fly starts hitting the window repeatedly in an effort to get out, Clint lets out a sigh and a ‘for fuck’s sake’ as he turns around in the bed, covered in a thin sheen of sweat, waiting for anything to stop the pain.

He will later on blame it on being feverish and absolutely mad with pain, but he knows what he saw. Tentacles coming out of the cat’s mouth, going straight for the fly and killing it instantly. Well, rather than that, eating it.

It takes him ten seconds to let go of the pillow he’s been clutching, hit with the sudden realization that his cat is apparently an alien, but the sweet, sweet silence of the room without the repeated buzzing of the fly forces him to finally fall asleep.

Three days later, he tells Fury what happened, and Fury tells him not to trust the cat. He might lose an eye if he does. 

**Author's Note:**

> You can always find me on [tumblr](https://spectralarchers.tumblr.com), where I'm spectralarchers as well!


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